And Jon just wanted to go skateboarding. He was down in the dry flats of a concrete wash at the new spot he’d found a few weeks prior. A bead of blood streaked down his forearm from a freshly reopened scab on his elbow. Skateboarding was a blood sport, an art form of bone and pain and push-through. He threw down and charged the line he’d been hitting hard for the past hour. He’d been making most of his tricks all morning, but he felt off his game. He wasn’t sure how or why. He stood there in the wash with the tail of his board pinned under his toe. He wrenched his arm around and looked at his elbow. The cut wasn’t too bad. He wiped the blood up with a palm and wiped the palm on the back of his jeans. His hungry stomach groaned and sweat leaked out of his forehead into his eyes. The sun was full-on hot now. Jon was done skating.

He rolled back toward the bridge over the wash, up where his pickup was parked. He could see a car up there on the bridge behind his truck, a dark boxy sedan like an old police cruiser. The car had pulled in right behind him when he got there at dawn. He hadn’t thought anything of it then, but now he was looking at it and wondering, had anyone ever gotten out of the car?

He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t see if anyone was behind the wheel. There was too much glare on the windshield and the angle was wrong. The car just sat there plain and square.

He grabbed his skateboard, climbed up the steep concrete bank. He tossed his board into the back of his pickup and swapped his T-shirt for a clean one. His stomach groaned again.

Jon drove to his favorite burrito spot. It was in a nameless strip mall with a coin laundry, a donut shop, and a drive-up coffee shack that seemed never to be open. The woman taking Jon’s order was giving him that gear-turning look he had seen a thousand times before. People often recognized Jon. He was, for lack of a better word, famous. In the early years after his accident, people would ask him, “Hey, aren’t you Dinosaur Kid?” Jon’s replies had been about a fifty-fifty split between “yeah” and “who?” But now, after all these years, the video that had been among the first ever to log one million views had long since spun into obscurity. These days, people would only stare at him from time to time, gears turning behind their eyes, working to place his face.

Jon placed his burrito order and stood to the side of the counter to wait. His eye was drawn outside to the parking lot as the same square sedan from before rolled in.

Jon watched the car. Tinted windows. Glare. He couldn’t see the driver.

Jon was thinking about paranoia. Then the driver’s door fell open.

A brown chukka shoe hit the blacktop below the door. A very large man with a great big belly pried himself up and stood with his forearm resting on the roof. He scanned the parking lot and glanced at Jon’s pickup before banging the heavy door shut on his car. The large hard belly stretched the man’s brown polo shirt. His forearms were as big and firm as hams. His head was gigantic and covered in tight gray-black curls. He wore a large pair of tinted bifocals and an extra pair of drugstore readers hung from a neoprene lanyard around his neck.

The man came in and stood in the doorway. He scanned the room, his eyes hesitating only for an instant on Jon’s face before rolling up to the menu board. Jon was aware of himself intentionally not looking at the man, aware of his own apprehension. Then the big guy looked Jon right in the eye and started walking toward him.

The man said, “You’re Jon, right?” He stuck his hand out to shake and said, “I’m Wilbert Lyman.”

And Jon had seen this all before.

And Jon just wanted to go skateboarding.